Writing

The events system has become an integral part of CakePHP since its introduction in 2.1. When originally introduced, we needed to make a number of compromises in the implementation to facilitate compatibility with the code it was replacing. For 3.0, I wanted to revisit the event subsystem and try to make things more efficient and streamline the API a bit.

I recently moved hosting for this blog and my wife’s site to a shiny new linode. I did this because I wanted to have control over the versions of PHP, and other server software I ran. I had some issues with email blacklists at my previous host. I chose linode as I’ve heard nothing but good things from friends and my operations folks at work recommended them.

I really like how composer simplifies dependency management & installation. It can make applications more portable, and simpler to deploy when compared to the pear installer. Another really nice feature of composer is that you can easily install any pear package, making it perfect for installing CakePHP. While installation was simple, some extra work was required to get things up and running smoothly.

A while back I posted on twitter that I had figured out how to use xdebug & vim and promised to do a blog post on how I got it all working. This is that blog post. Before we can get started using Vim to remote debug PHP code, we’ll need to do a few things.

Making sure your freshly released CakePHP plugin still passes all of its tests can be a bit of a time sink. Setting up Jenkins for small project can be a big job. After I setup Jenkins once or twice, I personally longed for a simple way to get continuous integration with not much work.

Many of the web applications I build have to talk to other webservices. Sometimes those services are internal API servers, sometimes they are external. In both situations, I want a simple, easy to use client library.

I recently re-discovered a powerful, but mostly hidden feature of jQuery. If you’ve used jQuery for any length of time you’ve probably used filter selectors like :input, :visible or :hidden. What you may not know is, it is really simple to add your own filter selectors. The secret lies in $.expr.filters which is an object of filters.

Early work has started for CakePHP 3.0, and I’ve started re-visiting how CakePHP handles configuration and bootstrapping. I want to focus on configuration for this post, as bootstrapping, while related is worthy of its own post. The goal of this post is to provide some context on the planned changes, and to get feedback on those changes. My hope is that by getting feedback early on we can avoid problems & surprises later on.

In the last article I went over the various static analysis tools I’ve found useful, and how to get them installed. For this installment, I’ll be going over how to use make to run all the tasks, and how to configure all the tools to work with Jenkins.

I’ve recently integrated static analysis tools into both my day job’s and CakePHP’s development process. Setting up static analysis tools is reasonably easy and can help you find problems before you even get to unit tests, or staging sites. They are also the ideal tool to help enforce coding standards, and best practices that can be checked by reading the code.

We use selenium extensively at work for automated acceptance tests. If you’ve never used selenium, it allows you to record and playback browser sessions and create integration tests from the perspective of a browser. Its generally a great tool, and really helps make sure we don’t release broken code. Recently, however I’ve found Selenium can have adverse reactions with jQuery.

One of the new features in CakePHP 2.1 I am excited about are view blocks and view inheritance. Both are concepts borrowed from Jinja2 and other templating systems. Template inheritance allows you to create skeleton views, and define blocks to populate that skeleton in a child template.

I’ve been running the PHP5.4 RC builds for the last few months, and there are some interesting changes in the upcoming PHP release. On top of all the great new features coming in PHP5.4. After updating to PHP5.4-RC4, a few things that used to not trigger errors and silently do the wrong thing, now trigger notices or warnings.

I’ve been working all day everyday with Monaco for the last 6 years. Monaco is a great typeface, it has a number of really great properties. It has a large x-height, and a large m-width. This make it great typeface at small sizes. While monaco is a perfectly good typeface, I wanted experiment and see if there is another typeface that would be even better.

With the recent release of PHP 5.4-RC1, I wanted to give it a spin and make sure there weren’t any upcoming issues for CakePHP. I recently saw a great article from Derick Rethans on getting PHP setup from an SVN checkout.

Recent Artwork

Links

Mark is a designer and web-developer, working with standards compliant HTML and CSS. He has been building websites since 2000. Currently he is employed at Freshbooks as a developer, and actively contributes to open source projects specifically CakePHP. He uses this site as a place to share what he has learned and made.